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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The authority to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from Congress too; now, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging may assist the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to change districts triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the vote is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to redraw their own maps in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the reality that most Democrats, I think, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and reduce the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his actions and to force members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist